The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the presently named inventors, to the extent it is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that may not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted as prior art against the present disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in the present disclosure and are not admitted to be prior art by their inclusion in this section.
To communicate data, a computing device may request a resource that may be available at another computing device. For example, a computing device may execute a peer-to-peer (“P2P”) application that may be adapted to consume a resource. With P2P, a device may operate as both a client and a server—that is, a device may both offer and request resources. Existing protocols, however, generally require one or more central servers to store mappings from textual resource descriptions to actual Internet protocol (“IP”) addresses and ports at which those resources are available. The accessing an additional computing system to facilitate the communication of data between two computing devices may require significant overhead.